"The Future is already here. (It is just not uniformly distributed.)."
--- William Gibson

"Adherence to dogmas has destroyed more armies and cost more battles than anything in war."
--- J.F.C. Fuller

"Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur."
--- Giulio Douhet

"If there is one attitude more dangerous than to assume that a future war will be just like the last one, it is to imagine that it will be so utterly different that we can afford to ignore all the lessons of the last one."
--- MRAF Sir John C. Slessor

"The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it."
--- Peter Drucker

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
--- Charles Darwin

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--- George Bernard Shaw

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
--- Ariel, singing to Ferdinand, in Shakespeare's Tempest

Cebrowski said the time has come to turn old models upside-down. The nation always has been strategically defensive and operationally offensive, he said. As problems like the possibility of weapons of mass destruction move in closer to home, he explained, it's becoming obvious that being operationally defensive is more advantageous. And because the consequences are so grave, strategic offense may be necessary, he added. "This is a switch. It defies all the thinking we've had … for American diplomacy for a long time," he said.

The focus on intelligence has changed, too, he said. Social intelligence -- an in-depth knowledge of local culture and customs -- is being valued much more over military intelligence.

Demystifying Transformation (local copy), 14 Aug 2002, from American Forces Press Service, includes brief discussion of Millennium Challenge 2002 and operations in Afghanistan and what they show and don't show about transformation

The most important area for transformation is the space "between our warfighters' ears," said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. Richard B. Myers addressed the need for servicemembers and Department of Defense civilians to transform the way they think. He said DOD people need to be more agile, innovative and not afraid to take appropriate chances.

The way the military has trained and educated leaders is a hurdle that must be overcome, the chairman said.

"We have to create a new generation of leaders who are not constrained by what the doctrine says," he said.

"In today's world, there ought to be a premium for people who are thinking, innovative and are willing to take appropriate risks," he said. "If you don't try, and you stay locked in the doctrine that brought you there, you're going to fail. You are not going to be as good as you can be in terms of efficiency in the battlespace, and you're probably going to hurt your people. You've got to adapt."

General Myers said the U.S. Joint Forces Command is the epicenter of transformation in the U.S. military.

"In fact, given the threats we face, we have to take a hard look at how we're organized and how we should be organized," he said.

The chairman said people are working hard at changing the culture.
"But it's a big ship and not much of a rudder," he said. "It's tough to turn the ship in the direction it needs to go."

On the battlefield, people will be as innovative as they have to be in order to be successful.
"We have to make sure we support that," General Myers said. "It's a formula for disaster if we don't do this transformation."

Instead of maintaining two occupation forces, we will place greater emphasis on deterrence in four critical theaters, backed by the ability to swiftly defeat two aggressors at the same time, while preserving the option for one massive counter-offensive to occupy an aggressor's capital and replace the regime.

To prepare for the future,

we also decided to move away from the so-called threat-based strategy that had dominated our country's defense planning for nearly a half-century and adopt what we characterized as a capability-based strategy, one that focuses less on who might threaten us or where we might be threatened, and more on how we might be threatened and what we need to do to deter and defend against such threats.

... must be focused on achieving six transformational goals:

protect the U.S. homeland and our bases overseas

project and sustain power in distant theaters

deny our enemies sanctuary

protect our information networks from attack

use information technology to link up different kinds of U.S. forces so that they can in fact fight jointly

CSAF Task Force CONOPS - "we are developing a family of Task Force CONOPS that will describe how we tailor forces from the Expeditionary Air and Space Force (AEF) construct and employ them in a variety of real-world scenarios" -- Gen Jumper, in Military Aerospace Technology Online, May 2002

Outliers is the new forum for the visionary, revolutionary, controversial and even heretical ideas for military innovation that are not easily incorporated into traditional military-sanctioned briefs or publications. We provide a way for masterful and ingenious ideas to be heard and create a process for their discussion and profiling in the mainstream of society.

The Air Force has innovative people, yet it fails to take full advantage of them and, indeed, sometimes hinders them. Over the course of the study the team met many creative Airmen (both military and civilian) predisposed to the types of disruptive thinking fundamental to this study. They uniformly expressed frustration at the lack of a forum to present their ideas and at the impediments for advancing those ideas as system solutions fielded for the war fighter. Both the Air Force’s bureaucratic acquisition process and risk-adverse culture limit their effectiveness as innovators. A critical need, for example, in any innovative organization is the free flow of information. One of the most disappointing findings of the study was the identification of intentional efforts to stifle information exchange around the USAF. Borne of fears over cyber-security, the USAF communications systems managers implement an information lock-down that too often defies logic. No one questions the worth of readiness for cyber attacks and network warfare, but restrictive security practices frequently hamper reasonable, necessary information exchange. The Air Force needs policies and technologies that balance network security and the need to collaborate effectively to pursue innovation.

The Air Force has largely lost its ability to foster disruptive innovation. The future demands that the Air Force once again become a leader in disruptive innovation, and the rest of this report outlines our suggestions initiating this transition.